This one, especially. Graduating. It's funny: last year, garden class was basically black girls plus Dylan. This year, it was basically Mexican boys plus Dylan.
Holding it down every Monday was the fabulous brother team of Uriel and Jose. Uriel is one of those eleven year-olds who seem thirty-five. There are a lot of them at the school. I had seen him on the bus once, before he joined garden class. For reasons unknown he had somewhere to go, alone, on a school day afternoon, and he sat crumpled in his seat looking weighted by the world. Only his feet swinging well above the bus floor gave away the fact that he was a kid.
Jose is lighter of heart, as younger brothers will be. Here he is being Bugs Bunny, with Uri's support. Ever the comedian, his favorite joke was to sneak up on me when I was inspecting cabbage leaves or checking seedbeds before class. I caught him every time, but he could never be deterred from trying again. One day he did this hilarious bit he called watering "like a model". He made his eyes all smoldering and did suave hose maneuvers with one hand while rubbing his head mock-sensuously with the other. And he loved weeding competitions, because he ended up with the biggest weed pile and won the prize every time.
There was Oscar: quiet, eager to please, and best known for his starring role in the game "Who's Taller: Oscar or the Pea Plant?" (which successively became "Who's Taller: Uriel or the Pea Plant?" and then "Who's Taller: Miss Emma or the Pea Plant?" and finally "Who's Taller: Kobe or the Pea Plant?")
And there was Shauntenai, who was surly and difficult ninety percent of the time. But that other ten percent--oh man, how sweet it was. You had to toil for it. She only ever showed up for half an hour at a time, but she planted the most successful tomato seedling, and took a lot of pride in that fact.
We dug potatoes on the last day, and pulled our garlic. And watered, as always. And as always, the kids wanted to put the hose head on the cherished "mist" setting, which creates a beautiful, cooling cloud of water, almost none of which reaches the soil. (Probably my most frequently-yelled admonition this year was "Put it back on 'shower'!") One very hot afternoon this spring, I announced that there would be a special treat. At the end of class, I gathered all the kids in front of me, held the hose over their heads, and put it on "mist."
Here's the thing about Dylan. Yeah, he's bright. Yeah, he's sweet (often enough to cancel out when he isn't). Yeah, he's got gardening in his blood. But the quality that won me over most completely was his weirdness. Witness the photo above. Oh, it's cute, sure. Sweet kid, sweet smile. But look a little closer. Those green things aren't part of his "Water Strider" shirt, which looked like a brand-new freebie. No: he picked Scarlet Runner beans (from the vine just to the right of his head in the picture) and discovered what he called their "velcro" capacity and stuck them to his shirt. See what I mean? He also ate a carrot and turned the tops into a lash--even had the audacity to give me lashings with it, and I had the audacity to let him get away with it, on the Last Day principle.
After all the kids had been picked up, I finished watering the vegetable beds and found myself getting teary. When I got in the car that Keri Hilson "Knock You Down" song burst on the radio, way too loud. You know: Sometimes love comes around/And it knocks you down...I had denounced the song as cheesy. But as I drove homeward dewy-eyed, tender images of Dylan digging potatoes still playing in my mind, it sounded pretty right.
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